Weekly Geekly

January 8, 2016

Weekly Geekly

January 8, 2016

Sir Ken Robinson - Can Creativity Be Taught?

Tip of the Week- Making Better Presentations for the Classroom

Okay, I admit it, I got this from TeachThought too. It is such a great article , I had to link it here. Okay, so this is for all my PowerPoint lovers who show PowerPoint presentations every day in class. Think about how many PPT slides your students have viewed this year. Yeah. Let that sink in.

Look, this is HARD STUFF. If you read this article and try to do all 5 tips in one presentation, you will discover that making a really GOOD presentation is difficult. But give it a try. You will learn a lot from the process.

Follow Friday

Today I present to you @TechNinjaTodd aka Todd Nelsoney who is well known in the Ed Tech world and is actually from Brenham, TX. He was a "20 to watch" by the National School Board Association, a "Top Innovator in Education" by the Center for Digital Education and was selected as a White House "Champion of Change". You can visit his web site at http://www.toddnesloney.com/.

Alos check out the New Media Consortium @NMCorg (website at www.nmc.org) which is in their words an "organization devoted to exploring the use of new media for teaching, learning & creative inquiry." They also founded the Horizon Report series.

ISTE Standard of the Week

Part 4 of the ISTE Standards for Students is titled "Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making". It states that students should "use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources." Part a of this standard says that students should "identify and define authentic problems and significant problems for investigation".

To me, this one is hard. It is so much faster and easier to give the students a problem and tell them how to solve it. Once you start letting them discover how to solve the problem, you are looking at more time and more work for the student. And when they have to discover the question itself? Wow. But what a valuable thing for them to know how to do. Now that is an authentic task.

Tool of the Week: Quizalize

Quizalize is another online quizzing tool for those looking for alternate assessment methods. It looks like just multiple choice questions right now, but MATH folks, there is a math mode for adding equations and you can add images too!

If you give it a try, let me know. I would love some feedback because this one is super new to me too! I included an instructional video below.